Q: Can you talk about your musical history and the formation of The Television Of Cruelty?​JB: As the Bernie Taupin to Ian’s Elton John…

IW: Oh yeah, you should see the size of my reading glasses.

JB: We go back to a cracking little punk-folk combo The Waiting List. Over the years fate has parted us and reunited us, but here we are, still hackin’ it. Still crazy?

IW: You don’t have to be mad to be in The Television Of Cruelty but unfortunately we actually are. After the last parting of the ways, I formed the band as an outlet for my musical urges. After a few years, John and I got in touch again and I realized – yet again – that he’s a much better lyricist than me. He sends me lyrics through the post and, when I get the itch to write a song, I reach for that envelope full of words. For me, it’s such a release. The lyrics are brilliant, stuffed full of ideas and emotions and references from movies and literature. The tunes just spill out. The band is actually a family thing too – my wife, my kids, along with various family friends, have all performed on our recordings. Four albums and five EPs since 2005 - and here we are.

Q: I have to ask about the cover art. Please tell me a little about this?

IW: I was thinking about Small Town Stardust and it made me think of buskers. You know, someone on a street corner with a guitar, bringing some glam to a boring high street. Then I came across these people performing outside a department store in Croydon and they just seemed perfect. I asked them if I could take a snap, put a couple of quid in the pot. I love the way the man’s dressed so smartly. Actually, the sound they made was really odd too – it sounded like English but you couldn’t make out any of the words, and they did it with such happy seriousness. They call themselves a “singing ministry (self-funded).” Made me smile.I decided to go for a black and white image after a couple of polls I ran it on our Facebook page and benumu.com.

JB: Back seat on this. I did it for The Waiting List but now Ian and another long-term cohort, Pete Brooks, get the job done. Very cool stuff!

​IW: Oh yeah, Pete’s done some great designs for us. For the Dead Sea Shanties album he created fantastic 3D images for the cover art. And he put together a stunning CGI video for our song Endless Street. Check it out on YouTube!

Q: On your Bandcamp page it mentions the themes you sing about. Can you talk a little bit about that and if there are any overarching themes that tie the songs together?

​IW: In The Waiting List days I used to joke that John’s lyrics were always about one of three things – war, football and feminism. Actually, in a lot of those songs he managed to get all three in! I think these days he’s branched out into ideas around positivity in the face of adversity. The Lingerie Of Sabotage, for example, is about fighting back against the rise of populist fascism through love. And sex. Rude boy. We’ve always been left-wing, often angry, liberal. Someone has to be, I don’t see many bands around at the moment fighting back. God knows what Lennon would think. Television Of Cruelty songs often cover some quite melancholic subjects. Wet weekends, decadence, loss. John is the Philip Larkin of modern music.

Q: You have been gigging around the music scene since the ’80s. What has stayed consistent through the years and what do you think has changed?

IW: I’m going to sound like an old fart here, but “popular” music hasn’t really changed for the better since the ‘80s. I find most modern pop and indie rather uninspiring and bland. Not that music back then was perfect of course, I mean we had Duran Duran and the bloody Thompson Twins, right? But we also had Echo & The Bunnymen and The Smiths and The Pogues and John Peel, so it wasn’t all bad. For me, what’s lacking in contemporary music is the lyrical content. The standard of lyric writing has taken a real nose-dive since the heyday of the ‘60s and ‘70s. I’m not talking about rap, which is a different thing entirely, but sung lyrics.

JB: Basically… then: cold midnight hours in Transit vans. Hard graft, but vinyl. Now you can sell stuff to the world from your sofa. Joy!​IW: Yeah, that’s true. And you don’t have to pay some disinterested bloke in a dingy studio to get a recording done. Most of our stuff is recorded in my back bedroom. And you can self-release, of course. We used to walk miles, hawking cassette tapes from A&R man to A&R man in London, and hitching home up the M1 to Nottinghamshire afterwards.

Q: What is your creative process like?

JB: Always lyrics first. I tend to send Ian a deluge of lyrics. He turns “stuff” into songs.

IW: Oh, and what a deluge it is! Thankfully. It all starts with the lyrics. I try to use them exactly as written, although do rearrange bits if necessary. Sometimes a verse becomes the chorus. Sometimes I have to text John for another verse. When I was putting Thirty Quid Guitar together, I asked him for an additional verse but wrote my own before I received it. No problem, I used both of the new ones, which is why is has three verses now. Once the song’s written, I usually put down an acoustic guitar to a click track, then build it up from there. On Road Movie I “played” the drum part on a keyboard rather than programming it. It gave a much looser, more natural feel, which is just what the song needed. Lingerie Of Sabotage, on the other, has on obvious drum machine part. Mixing takes hours, of course, and I do quite a lot of active mixing. Once that’s all done, the tracks go for mastering. This allows another pair of ears to – hopefully - bring out the best in them.

Q: What else should we know about The Television of Cruelty?

JB: I think we always espouse an anti-selfishness theology, not gloom and doom. Every song on Small Town Stardust, and for the future, should be seen as “It is an act of rebellion to see the good in people. And trash the bad guys!”